Friday, June 5, 2009

Another NYC highlight this past week was Kelly giving me, Daniel, Steph (Reviewer X) and Nicole (Linus's Blanket) a tour of Hachette's offices on Monday morning. Kelly took nearly two hours out of her day to answer our questions and show us around. Thank you to Kelly and the whole online team at Hachette. You are doing a great job reaching out to bloggers.

Group shot (Kelly Leonard, Anna Balasi, Miriam Parker, Nicole, Brianne Beers, me, Steph, Valerie Russo)Our first stop was to visit Alice in the Little, Brown Young Readers division. I can't tell you how cool it was to see her desk piled high with ARCs of HATE LIST, ASH and PROPHESY OF THE SISTERS (all spoken for). No stack of BEAUTIFUL CREATURES because they went superfast!

Alice's deskShe told us a bit about her job and that she gathers up ARC requests and then deals with them all at once about once a week. She loves digest e-mails, so if you owe her links to several reviews, it is best if you wait to send them all at once.

Me and Alice Morley in front of this season's Little, Brown Young Readers signWe walked around and looked at a couple of the other departments and imprints, with Kelly telling us about what they do.

Kelly points out the various imprintsAnd of course, she had to show us the ARC closet that Brianne recently organized. I am sure I squealed when I saw it.

Brianne shows off her handiworkKelly showed us Hachette's video studio and then took us to a whole different floor to check out Hachette's in-house, state-of-the-art audio recording studio where actors and authors come in to record audio books.

What I'd look like if I was recording an audio book Hachette is very pro-book blogger and were very early adapters in online marketing. They are both amazingly accommodating and genuinely thrilled to be working with us.

Thanks for posting this, I've always wanted to see what the inside of a publishing house looks like. And loved the picture of you showing what it would look like if you were recording an audio book! hehe!

Thanks for sharing your tour with us! It was so nice to see the "behind the scenes" at Hachette and faces of the wonderful women that support book bloggers. The ARC closet and audio booth were my favorites!! What a wonderful trip that you had in NYC!

Lenore, I loved this post! Thanks for giving us an inside look at Hachette. I've had the pleasure of working with Miriam several times and it's great to see how Hachette operates. I now want to move to New York and work for them. (How awesome would it be to be surrounded by so many books all day and actually get paid for it?)

You probably wouldn't have been able to drag me away from the ARC closet.

I'm so jealous of you guys. How did you get such a great tour like that? I'm so glad to see Alice, she's been so nice on emails and stuff. And look at the ARC closet! Anyone else wants to be book thief?

One thing I didn't mention in the post - the security is tight. You have to present yourself to security guards downstairs who check your ID and then call up to see if you are expected. That's so no one pops in to try to sell a manuscript (or raid the ARC closet ;))